A total of 4.4 million tablets were shipped in India, registering a growth of 13% compared to 2014, according to CMR’s India Annual Tablet PC Market Review, CY 2015.
The report said that cellular access to devices is increasing in India, where 3 of the 4 devices sold in 2015 were supporting cellular internet. The uptake of 4G enabled tablets is also on the rise as over 7% of the total tablets shipped supported 4G. Giving insights about top vendors, the report said that Samsung, Datawind and Micromax took the top 3 spots in CY 2015. Samsung continued lead with 17% share in the tablet market, closely followed by Datawind, Micromax, and iBall in the entire 2015. Android remained the default top OS choice with 92% share while iPad sales dipped 22% in units. Windows on the other hand rose by mere 1 percent at 3%.
In case of Q4, 2015, Datawind emerged as the tablet market leader with 24% share, followed by Samsung and Pantel with 18% and 17% shares, respectively. Micromax and Lenovo came in fourth and fifth with 15% and 8% market share. Tablets shipments declined at 31% QoQ and 21% YoY. Meanwhile, 9% of the total tablets shipped were 4G while 12% of them were cellular tablets.
Commenting on the Tablet performance, Tanvi Sharma, Analyst for Tablet Devices at CMR, said,
The marginal rise in tablet performance could be attributed to a few government deals. However, with the rising demand for Phablets/Smartphones, the challenge for the industry would be to make it more exciting and bring in features attracting consumer segment especially, which should be other than the screen size. The trend could be seen shifting towards convertibles tablets that come with a detached keyboard. At the same time, price sensitive consumers are resorting to sub-5K band, instead of 5k-10k tablets, which was the trend last year.
Commenting on the performance of the India Tablet PC market, Faisal Kawoosa, Lead Analyst CMR Telecoms Practice, said,
Tablets have to re-emerge to revitalize as a distinct product. We are seeing, whatever sustainability capabilities, primarily driven by government procurement that keeps the volumes going. We expect 2016 to be even more challenging for the Tablet market. Other than the government support through demand creation, the industry has to evolve them as solutions for the market to grow. This is the right moment for augmentation as we expect 4G to grow its ‘real’ base in India and such users will be using a lot of video content for which screen size definitely matters, to the advantage of Tablets.
Last week, IDC reported that global tablet shipments will fall 5.9% in 2016 and hybrid tablets aka 2-in-1 devices are expected to grow from 16.6 million shipments in 2015 to 63.8 million in 2020.